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On top of all this we have a look at the scientific facts about the region, the geology and the fauna and flora and discuss the theories that the earth and the solar system is  billions of years old or do the facts support a young earth theory. We give you the facts and you decide.

The Earth: how old does it look?
Based on an article by Carl Wieland with added comment by Russell Humphreys and Jonathan Sarfati.

Many of those who believe that the earth is ‘young’ think that it looks ‘old’. But does it?

A young man, a carpenter, in his early twenties who had recently taken up downstairs lodging in Carl Wieland’s home, looked at him warily. ‘All right then,’ he said, ‘how old do you guys think the earth is?’ Carl had just been telling him about his work for a creation ministry, and he was most curious. Knowing how people in our culture are indoctrinated with belief in an earth millions of years old, Carl braced himself for the usual incredulous rejection when he said what he truly believed, ‘It’s only a few thousand years old—less than 10,000, probably around 6,500 years or so.’

To Carl’s surprise, the young man said, ‘That’s good.’

‘Why?’ Carl blurted out.

‘Because,’ the young man replied, ‘I’ve always thought it looked young.’

Pondering this incident at a later date, Carl realized that his own reaction showed that, however strong his convictions he had become unconsciously influenced by the notion that the earth, though young, looks old. But in fact it’s easy to demonstrate that this cannot be true. Even if the earth really were millions or billions of years old, one could not say that it ‘looked old’—that one glance at rock layers and canyons just ‘shouted’, ‘Old Earth!’. To justify that statement, you don’t even have to get into sophisticated references to modern philosophers of science, who agree that no facts ‘speak for themselves’ anyway. All we need do is remember that some of the greatest minds that ever lived, the fathers of modern science—Newton, for example—looked at the same earth that we look at today, and did not ‘see’ millions of years. Just as the young carpenter, a truly independent thinker who had resisted the indoctrination of our age, did not ‘see’ the millions of years either.

The earth is only seen as ‘looking old’ because we all take unconscious belief systems to the evidence. In other words, it could be said that the earth looks neither old nor young—it all depends on the ‘belief glasses’ through which one is viewing (interpreting) the evidence.

Below we summarize just some of the abundant evidence that is consistent with a young age for the world and our universe.

1. The continents are eroding too quickly.
2. There is not enough helium in the atmosphere.
3. Many fossils indicate that they must have formed quickly.
4. Many processes which we have been told take millions of years, do not need such time-spans at all.
5. The oceans are nowhere near salty enough.
6. Galaxies wind themselves up too fast
7. No very old Supernovas
8. Many strata are too tightly bent
9. Injected sandstone shortens geologic ‘ages’
10. Not enough stone age skeletons
11. History is too short
12. What the Moon has to say
13. The earth is old!

1) The continents are eroding too quickly.
If the continents were billions of years old, they would have eroded by wind and water many times over. Mountain uplift and other ‘recycling’ processes are nowhere near capable of compensating for this. Since Roman times, the sea has eroded some 3km of the mid-east coast, destroying many villages in Humberside in England. On average 1.5m of land has disappeared every year. One million years at this rate would see 1500km eroded, more than the entire width of England and Ireland.


2) There is not enough helium in the atmosphere.
a) Helium, a light gas, is formed during radioactive alpha decay in rock minerals. It rapidly escapes and enters the atmosphere much faster than it can escape Earth’s gravity. Even if the world had been created with no helium to begin with, the small amount in the atmosphere would have taken at most around two million years to accumulate. This is far less than the assumed 3,000-million-year age of the atmosphere.

b) Taking a loss of helium into account, the atmosphere today has only 0.05% of the amount of helium it would have accumulated in 5 billion years. This means the atmosphere is much younger than the alleged age. A study published in the Journal of Geophysical Research shows that helium produced by radioactive decay in deep, hot rocks has not had time to escape, though the rocks are supposed to be over one billion years old. Their large helium retention suggests an age of only thousands of years.

3) Many fossils indicate that they must have formed quickly.

a) Common fossils.
There are billions of fossil fish in rock layers around the world which are incredibly well-preserved. They frequently show intact fins and often scales, indicating that they were buried rapidly and the rock hardened quickly. In the real world, dead fish are scavenged within 24 hours. Even in some idealized cold, sterile, predator-free and oxygen-free water, they will become soggy and fall apart within weeks. A fish buried quickly in sediment that does not harden within a few weeks at the most will still be subject to decay by oxygen and bacteria, such that the delicate features like fins, scales, etc. would not preserve their form. Rapid burial in the many underwater landslides (turbidity currents) and other sedimentary processes accompanying a Global Flood would explain not only their excellent preservation, but their existence in huge deposits, often covering thousands of square kilometres.

b) Special examples.
Often featured are particularly spectacular instances, like the mother ichthyosaur apparently ‘freeze-framed’ in the process of giving birth. Then there are the fossil fish which are found either in the process of swallowing other fish or with undigested fish intact in their stomachs

c) Haemoglobin found in Fossil Bones
Red blood cells and hemoglobin have been found in some (unfossilized!) dinosaur bone. But these could not last more than a few thousand years—certainly not the 65 million years from when old age thinkers think the last dinosaur lived

4) Many processes, which we have been told take millions of years, do not need such time-spans at all.

a) Coal formation.
Argonne National Laboratories have shown that heating wood (lignin, a significant component) and clay at 150°C (rather cool geologically) for 4 to 36 weeks, in a sealed quartz tube with no added pressure, forms high-grade black coal.

b) Stalactites and stalagmites.
Many examples have shown that cave decorations form quickly, given the right conditions. An example of this is a mining tunnel in Mt Isa, Queensland, Australia, where the tunnel was only 50 years old yet large stalactites had formed in the tunnel.

c) Opals.
Despite the common teaching that it takes millions of years to form opal, Australian researcher Len Cram has long been growing opal in his backyard laboratory. His opal is indistinguishable, under the electron microscope, from that mined in the field. He was awarded an honorary doctorate for this research. All he does is mix together the right common chemicals — no heat, no pressure, and definitely no millions of years.

d) Rock and fossil formation.
Scientists have long known that petrifaction can happen quickly. The ‘petrified’ bowler hat is on display in ‘The Buried Village’, an open air museum dedicated to the Mt Tarawera eruption, in New Zealand. A roll of no. 8 fencing wire which, in only 20 years, became encased in solid sandstone, containing hundreds of fossil shells. Petrified wood can also form quickly under the right conditions—one process has even been patented.
e) Fossil Forests
The famous multiple levels of ‘fossil forests’ in America’s Yellowstone National Park have now been shown to have formed in one volcanic event. Successive mudflows transported upright trees (minus most of their roots and branches) whose tree-ring signatures confirm that they grew at the one time.
f) Earths Magnetic Field
The earth’s magnetic field has been decaying so fast that it couldn’t be more than about 10,000 years old. Rapid reversals during the flood year and fluctuations shortly after just caused the field energy to drop even faster.

5) The oceans are nowhere near salty enough.
Each year, the world’s rivers and underground streams add millions of tons of salt to the sea, and only a fraction of this goes back onto the land. Using the most favourable possible assumptions for long-agers, the absolute maximum age of the oceans is only a tiny fraction of their assumed billions-of-years age.

6) Galaxies wind themselves up too fast
The stars of our own galaxy, the Milky Way, rotate about the galactic center with different speeds, the inner ones rotating faster than the outer ones. The observed rotation speeds are so fast that if our galaxy were more than a few hundred million years old, it would be a featureless disc of stars instead of its present spiral shape. Yet our galaxy is supposed to be at least 10 billion years old. This is called ‘the winding-up dilemma’, which has been known for fifty years. Many theories have been devised to try to explain it, each one failing after a brief period of popularity. The same ‘winding-up’ dilemma also applies to other galaxies. Most of these theories have been called into serious question by the Hubble Space Telescope’s discovery of very detailed spiral structure in the central hub of the ‘Whirlpool’ galaxy, M51.

7) No very old Supernovas
A supernova is an explosion of a massive star—the explosion is so bright that it briefly outshines the rest of the galaxy. The supernova remnants (SNRs) should keep expanding for hundreds of thousands of years, according to the physical equations. Yet there are no very old, widely expanded (Stage 3) SNRs, and few moderately old (Stage 2) ones in our galaxy, the Milky Way, or in its satellite galaxies, the Magellanic clouds. This is just what we would expect if these galaxies had not existed long enough for wide expansion.

8) Many strata are too tightly bent
In many mountainous areas, strata thousands of feet thick are bent and folded into hairpin shapes. The conventional geologic time scale says these formations were deeply buried and solidified for hundreds of millions of years before they were bent. Yet the folding occurred without cracking, with radii so small that the entire formation had to be still wet and unsolidified when the bending occurred. This implies that the folding occurred less than thousands of years after deposition.

9) Injected sandstone shortens geologic ‘ages’
Strong geologic evidence exists that the Cambrian Sawatch sandstone—formed an alleged 500 million years ago—of the Ute Pass fault west of Colorado Springs was still unsolidified when it was extruded up to the surface during the uplift of the Rocky Mountains, allegedly 70 million years ago. It is very unlikely that the sandstone would not solidify during the supposed 430 million years it was underground. Instead, it is likely that the two geologic events were less than hundreds of years apart, thus greatly shortening the geologic time scale.

10)Not enough stone age skeletons
Some anthropologists say that the stone age lasted for at least 100,000 years, during which time the world population of Neanderthal and Cro-magnon men was roughly constant, between 1 and 10 million. All that time they were burying their dead with artefacts. By this scenario, they would have buried at least 4 billion bodies. If the evolutionary time scale is correct, buried bones should be able to last for much longer than 100,000 years, so many of the supposed 4 billion stone age skeletons should still be around (and certainly the buried artefacts). Yet only a few thousand have been found. This implies that the stone age was much shorter than evolutionists think, a few hundred years in many areas.

11)History is too short
According to the billions of years theory, stone age man existed for 100,000 years before beginning to make written records about 4000 to 5000 years ago. Prehistoric man built megalithic monuments, made beautiful cave paintings, and kept records of lunar phases. Why would he wait a thousand centuries before using the same skills to record history?

12)What the Moon has to say
The moon is slowly receding from earth at about 1½ inches (4 cm) per year, and the rate would have been greater in the past. But even if the moon had started receding from being in contact with the earth, it would have taken only 1.37 billion years to reach its present distance. This gives a maximum possible age of the moon—not the actual age. This is far too young for evolution (and much younger than the radiometric ‘dates’ assigned to moon rocks).

13)The earth is old!
The fact is that the earth neither ‘looks old’ nor ‘looks young’ as such—it all depends on the ‘glasses’ through which the evidence is interpreted. We all need to be aware of how much we have been conditioned by our culture to ‘see’ geological things as ‘looking old’.

Let us stretch our minds still further. It concerns the way we use words such as ‘old’ or ‘young’ for the earth’s age. I actually believe that the earth is old—very old. It is thousands of years old—as many as six thousand, in fact. Does that angle surprise you? My point is to make us aware of how we have allowed our culture to condition us into thinking that a thousand years is a very short time, and that ‘old’ always means millions or billions of years. That is why tourists, coming across the ‘petrified waterwheel’ in Western Australia gawk in amazement. ‘It only took sixty years to cover this thing in solid rock?’ Sixty years, with water carrying dissolved limestone dripping night and day onto an object, is actually an incredibly long time. It is our culture, soaked in the myth of ‘deep time’, that has indoctrinated us into the belief that a million years (an unimaginable time period, in reality) is only like ‘yesterday’.

So next time you hear someone say that the earth ‘looks old’, you can respectfully disagree—it can look almost ‘any age you want’, depending on how you interpret the factual evidence through the belief system in your mind. And if someone says the earth is old—you can agree with them, so long as you define what you mean by old—it’s really, really old, in fact it’s ancient. Some six entire millennia have elapsed since the world was created.

References

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